The use of touch-sensitive surfaces as input devices for computers and other electronic computing devices has increased significantly in recent years. Example touch-sensitive surfaces include touch pads and touch screen displays. Such surfaces are widely used to review and edit electronic documents by manipulating a cursor within the electronic document presented on a display. These electronic documents are viewed or edited within applications having viewing and editing capabilities (e.g., drawing applications, presentation applications (e.g., Apple's KEYNOTE, or Microsoft's POWERPOINT), word processing applications (e.g., Apple's PAGES or Microsoft's WORD), website creation applications, spreadsheet applications (e.g., Apple's NUMBERS or Microsoft's EXCEL)).
Some conventional cursor manipulation methods on touch-sensitive devices require the use of force sensors and/or require that a user provide a multi-finger gesture (e.g., a gesture that requires a user to use two of their fingers, such as a two-finger tap). For touch-sensitive devices that do not include force sensors, pressure/force-sensitive gestures are not available. Additionally, such devices can also have a small amount of display screen area (e.g., the displays on these devices are generally small) and, thus, use of multi-finger gestures are inefficient and obscure too much of the already-small amount of display screen area. Some other conventional cursor manipulation methods on touch-sensitive devices require users to precisely place their finger at a desired location within text and, because many of these devices have a small amount of display screen area, these methods often result in inaccurate placement of the cursor.
As such, it is desirable to provide single-finger gestures for activating a trackpad mode (and accurately placing a cursor) for use on an electronic device with a touch-sensitive display and no force sensors.